Report: Pew Hides 1 Million-Plus New Migrants Into The United States

The Pew Research Center is hiding the huge new wave of low-skilled Mexican and Central American migrants that have crossed into the United States since July 2014, reports Daniel Horowitz, at Conservative Review.

If you want to know the depths of dishonesty and obfuscation the liberal elite employ in order to distort the reality on any given issue, take a look at this Pew research report on immigration from Mexico. Pew claims that migration from Mexico is down to such a point that there is net out-migration—that is to say more Mexicans in America have died or gone back home than returned.

Media outlets, from The Hill and Politico to the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, are breathlessly promoting the headline of this report as if it reflected the truth of the moment…

The one problem? Pew was using old data from 2009-2014…

As we reported several months ago, according to the most up-to-date census data, based on the Current Population Survey (CPS), there has been a massive spike in net migration from Mexico since 2014, precisely after Obama and the Gang of Eight began encouraging illegal immigration in a number of ways. The fact that 80 percent of illegal immigrants are now officially shielded from deportation and most others are unlikely to ever encounter resistance has clearly contributed to the surge.

When Breitbart asked Pew about Horowitz’s criticism, Pew downplayed the CPS data, but admitted the data suggested an inflow of 250,000 migrants in in the year up to September 2015.

We would like nothing more than to say something definitive about trends since 2014. However, the only data source currently available through mid-2015 is the monthly Current Population Survey, which is incomplete and unreliable for this task. Our analyses suggest that there may be some technical issues with this single data source and that it is premature to conclude that Mexican immigration has increased considerably on the basis of data from the CPS alone.

To go into more detail, our analysis with more recent CPS data through September 2015, shows that the “net inflow” of Mexican immigrants over the previous year was about 250,000, markedly lower than the 740,000 mentioned in the article you cited. Furthermore, it is possible that Census Bureau’s changes in its annual weighting procedures may have led to the higher estimate of net inflow in 2015 compared with 2014. Historically, looking at Mexican immigrant population changes annually using monthly CPS data produces a volatile result. Finally, other sources through 2014, such as FY 2014 U.S. Border Apprehensions Data, show no uptick in the apprehension of Mexican immigrants at the border.